Author: Curt Doolittle

  • Señor Doolittle: I recommend the following book as it deals (on a rather basic l

    Señor Doolittle: I recommend the following book as it deals (on a rather basic level) with social psychology, yet it contains lots of links to more literature concerning cultural differences in attitudes and prejudices or ingroup/outgroup behaviour.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-05 06:04:00 UTC

  • MISSION? 1) Give conservatives a language for rational articulation of their ide

    MISSION?

    1) Give conservatives a language for rational articulation of their ideas, culture, and values.

    2) Strive to speak in a manner comprehensible to the common people.

    Freaking hard. Really. I think the second is harder than the first. 😉


    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-01 11:09:00 UTC

  • WHY SHARIA LAW IS APPRECIATED BY MUSLIMS (harsh statements warning) First, befor

    http://ca.news.yahoo.com/many-muslim-world-want-sharia-law-land-survey-160939872.htmlON WHY SHARIA LAW IS APPRECIATED BY MUSLIMS

    (harsh statements warning)

    First, before we start this discussion we must understand that the Islamic civilization, outside of the former Soviet Union, is en large, poor, comparatively ignorant, abysmally ignorant of what we consider ‘scientific thought’ (or even engineering) and has illiteracy rates that range from 20-60%.

    So, when you ask a people if they would prefer a philosophical, political and legal system that they are familiar with, understand, and they consider ‘just’, you’re going to see positive survey responses. But it’s also because they don’t know the alternatives, and certainly can’t compare them.

    In the west, our christian ancestors relied first upon scripture, and then upon ‘natural law’ to help control abuses by the state. It wasn’t until we understood that it was an independent judiciary, the common law and property rights that were the source of freedom, not scripture, and certainly not government, that we abandoned these moral arguments in favor of rational ones. So we too had our episode of desiring the equivalent to Sharia in our past. The only difference is that we have incorporated greek rationalism -reluctantly- since the time of Augustine (and arguably, always.)

    Sharia law is effectively communist. Islamic radicalism has adopted the tactics of world communism for this reason: it’s a revolt by the lowest level civilization, containing the lowest status people outside of sub saharan africa, revolting against the rest of us. Islam grants social status to all equally. This is lost on the rest of us. We live in an aristocratic society where status is EARNED through demonstrated actions. We consistently hear muslims criticizing our interest in heroism. They find our way of life antagonistic – immoral even. Even here in the west, after a century and a half of attack on aristocracy by communism, socialism, feminism and postmodernism (the only politically meaningful being feminism because of the numbers of women who vote against aristocracy) we still retain our heroic culture. (Although, hollywood is having a very hard time producing heroic movies, when they make their money on the international market, without using space aliens.) At least, the majority of white males still practice western aristocratic values. And it is those values that gave us science, reason, and rule of law. (Something which westerners are no longer taught, because it would interfere with state sponsored socialism and the religion of postmodernism practiced by liberals.)

    We must also understand that Islamic society is corrupt, familial, and tribal (because it still inbreeds heavily), as well as mystical and arational. Access to oil revenues via the state grants groups luxuries and idleness that are status enhancing. So just as we have corruption in the west, as special interest and racial groups compete for control of the state, privileges, redistribution and tax revenues, the islamic world, or at least the oil rich regions, compete for access to those revenues.

    Because their society is pervasively corrupt, and tribal, and the western division of the ottoman empire into current states ignored tribal boundaries, these governments are not only terribly corrupt but tribally biased. Just as the USA should break into regions so that the coasts don’t continue to oppress the center and south, the Islamic countries need to be broken into a federation of tribes – something oil revenues make impossible.

    Justice in a corrupt and arbitrary and mystical society is unpredictable if not impossible.

    People rarely reform themselves if they can blame others. So they conveniently blame others – muslims, and Palestinians in particular, almost always choose the bad decision whenever it is presented to them.

    So Sharia is something they understand and trust, it is not arbitrary, not open to much interpretation, and difficult to corrupt. It favors the poor and ignorant. It gives status to people who are at the bottom of the human prestige pyramid, if not the bottom of it’s ethnic pyramid. Muslims are lower class backward outcasts in the rest of the world despite the promise of prestige that their religion promises them.

    It is not irrational for people in these circumstances to prefer Sharia. In fact, given the arbitrary state borders, the level of tribalism, mysticism, ignorance, and corruption in their civilization it is THE CORRECT SOLUTION FOR THEM until they develop rule of law. And they cannot develop the rule of law without a middle class, commercial society. You just can’t. Period. Commercial society disregards familial incentives. WE are all family in the market. This is intolerable to the primitive tribal, familial, and inbred cultures.

    I don’t complain about Muslims wanting Sharia law in their countries. I complaint about our courts excusing behavior because of it, and I complain that muslims do not integrate into western society, and they persist in their inbreeding.

    The only way we can tolerate Muslim culture in the west is to prohibit intermarriage and interbreeding out to six generations (by genetic test, and under threat of deportation) and to shutter all mosques and schools. That islam is practiced as a personal religion at home is one thing. That it is propagated as a political and legal system is another and is a violation of the rest of our rights. The moment that you state that your religion affects law and property, it is no longer a religion. It is politics.

    And in the case of communism and sharia law, It is war on civilization itself.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-01 10:28:00 UTC

  • LIFE’S GREAT DECISIONS Last summer, battling yet another illness, and realizing

    LIFE’S GREAT DECISIONS

    Last summer, battling yet another illness, and realizing the northwest would never again be a place I would want to live, I looked at the world in an effort to try to find a place to start a new business and write.

    One by one I eliminated most of the cities in the USA, other than perhaps a few in texas – I want an urban lifestyle. But there are almost no urban centers left that are culturally aristocratic. None. In fact, Urban culture is decidedly proletarian, with aristocracy, if it hasn’t moved out of the city altogether, restricted to walled enclaves.

    I can sit here in a cafe in a country where I can’t even reliably speak traveller’s level of the language, and identify with people better here than I can anywhere in the coastal states. This culture is an extended family. It’s relatively homogenous, even if torn between catholic east and orthodox west. But despite that division, I look on everyone as my people – my family. Because they feel look like and act like family.

    They are us before our decline.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-01 09:11:00 UTC

  • WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF ALL MONEY SUDDENLY DISAPPEARED? by Curt Doolittle, The Prop

    WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF ALL MONEY SUDDENLY DISAPPEARED?

    by Curt Doolittle, The Propertarian Institute

    (Reposted from Quora)

    Believe it or not, this subject has been given quite a bit of treatment in the literature – mostly during the early part of the last century in response to the communist, socialist and fascist movements.

    REALITY:

    Almost everyone, on the planet, except for perhaps ~500M subsistence farmers would die in the first 30-90 days. Yes. Really. Seriously.

    MONEY

    Money makes planning of complex things possible.

    Humans literally cannot ‘think’ as we understand the term, without numbers, money, property, contracts, credit and interest. Just as drawings and written words help us remember things, numbers help us remember things we could not remember, think about, or compare without them. Money makes numbers possible to apply to things that are DIFFERENT. Whereas numbers without money can only be used for things that are the SAME. As such, we say that money makes it possible to compare objects that are otherwise incommensurable. Money renders the world commensurable: open to planning and the use of mathematics (measurement and forecasting).

    In practical terms, money and prices form an information system that tells us all what to do in real time in response to what others want and need. It is how we tell each other how to cooperate. It is the human social system. And the use of that social system, plus the capture of fossile fuel, has taken us out of ignorance and poverty.

    CONVERSELY

    What money and credit have also done is make it possible to breed again up to new malthusian levels. While Malthus was only half right, he was half right. Group selection accomplishes what malthus did not account for. THe general belief of ‘progressives’ is that technology will ‘save us again’ just like agrarianism, and then pastoralism saved us in the past. But the truth is we just breed up to these levels again, and reduce ourselves back to poverty.

    The problem then is that we must control our breeding. And that has been, except for a brief period in china, or the middle ages in England under Manorialism impossible to achieve. Partly because it is so profitable to sell things to people who bear children, and those children as they too mature.

    EXAMPLES

    THe US economy is primarily driven by housing, and the high rate of return on lending for housing, and the large supply of labor jobs for the production of housing. From this perspective, the exceptional nature of the american economy is not the product of ‘democracy’ or innovation, but the product of selling off a continent to waves of immigrants and their offspring, and using the profits from the sale of the (conquered) continent to invest in increasingly complex technologies.

    THe Chinese for example have figured this out and are doing the same thing but moving people from the ‘poor’ village farm to cities where they *hope* the population will be more productive than they were at subsistence farming. China can do this bcause it adopted consumer capitalism (money, prices and interest) and abandoned communism (no money, no prices, and no interest).

    The problem other countries face (India and say, Ukraine) is india is so pervasively corrupt that it’s not possible to create infrastructure without privatization of the investment through corruption, and the population is still expanding unsustainably in a dirty and hot environment. THe problem Ukraine faces, is that it cannot play ‘china’ because the lower levels of government are so corrupt and the country sees no demand for its currency, so the government cannot issue credit, and therefore the people remain poor.

    IN CLOSING

    When you say ‘money went away’ what you must also understand is that with money and prices will go the ability to communicate, and think. Literally. Humans would not be able to cooperate, communicate, plan and think without money. Worse, they would have no incentive to do so, because to have an incentive one must be able to think of something to do. And you couldn’t think of anything to do that you couldn’t do with your own two hands.

    THere is about 4 days worth of energy, and 14 days worth of food in the pipeline. If you made money vanish, you would need to make 6B people vanish along with it.

    You may find a more thorough, or a more simplistic answer elsewhere. But this is the answer, and there isnt any alternative.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-01 06:37:00 UTC

  • ROCK. PANTS ARE PAINFULLY HOT. THE SAD LEGACY OF HORSEMANSHIP. 🙂 Yes. I have a

    http://www.psmag.com/culture/why-must-men-wear-pants-43384/KILTS ROCK. PANTS ARE PAINFULLY HOT. THE SAD LEGACY OF HORSEMANSHIP. 🙂

    Yes. I have a kilt. Yes I got married in a kilt. Yes, I think men look great in kilts.

    The… well, our ‘parts’ are not meant to be overheated. 🙂


    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-01 04:04:00 UTC

  • WITH A WIFE WHO IS A HOARDER IS A CRUSHING BATTLE THAT YOU WILL EVENTUALLY LOSE

    http://www.psmag.com/health/hoarding-science-55196/LIVING WITH A WIFE WHO IS A HOARDER IS A CRUSHING BATTLE THAT YOU WILL EVENTUALLY LOSE

    I lasted 17 years. But the eventual understanding that no matter how much money I made, it wouldn’t matter, and when she had a child, her nesting behavior, and the natural tiredness that comes from caring for young children amplified her hoarding behavior, and life became unbearable. I could not survive in that environment.

    Her apartment, when I met her, was piled floor to ceiling with papers and magazines, and junk. What’s fascinating to me is that she actually knows the contents of every box, pile, and drawer. I mean, to some degree, I’m envious of that kind of recall. Until of course, you realize that without those real-world indexes, that the hoarder cannot recall anything. And that this is one of the things that causes their behavior.

    We didn’t understand ‘hoarding’ as a compulsive behavior when we met. We just assumed it was harmless and silly. And I thought I could live with it, and control it. And I managed to contain it to ‘her’ one room – a studio. But when we had the baby, that studio became the baby’s room, and there were no boundaries.

    Not that I’m a piece of cake either. I mean, can you imagine living with me? Women seem to love it. But I think it’s just because I’m an uncontrollable catnip toy that doesn’t ever become boring. It’s not because i’m easy. I’m not. When combined with my health problems it was more than I could bear.

    I still love her to death and always will. And I miss her all the time. But living with that kind of thing is just unbearable. And its ruinous. And it’s incurable. And its tragic.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-01 03:48:00 UTC

  • What Would Happen If There Were No Money On Earth?

    Believe it or not, this subject has been given quite a bit of treatment in the literature – mostly during the early part of the last century in response to the communist, socialist and fascist movements.

    REALITY:
    Almost everyone, on the planet,  except for perhaps ~500M subsistence farmers would die in the first 30-90 days.  Yes.  Really.  Seriously.

    MONEY
    Money makes planning of complex things possible.
    Humans literally cannot ‘think’ as we understand the term, without numbers, money, property, contracts, credit and interest. Just as drawings and written words help us remember things, numbers help us remember things we could not remember, think about, or compare without them.  Money makes numbers possible to apply to things that are DIFFERENT.  Whereas numbers without  money can only be used for things that are the SAME. As such, we say that money makes it possible to compare objects that are otherwise incommensurable.  Money renders the world commensurable: open to planning and the use of mathematics (measurement and forecasting).

    In practical terms, money and prices form an information system that tells us all what to do in real time in response to what others want and need. It is how we tell each other how to cooperate.  It is the human social system. And the use of that social system, plus the capture of fossile fuel, has taken us out of ignorance and poverty.

    CONVERSELY
    What money and credit have also done is make it possible to breed again up to new malthusian levels. While Malthus was only half right, he was half right. Group selection accomplishes what malthus did not account for.  THe general belief of ‘progressives’ is that technology will ‘save us again’ just like agrarianism, and then pastoralism saved us in the past.  But the truth is we just breed up to these levels again, and reduce ourselves back to poverty.

    The problem then is that we must control our breeding.  And that has been, except for a brief period in china, or the middle ages in England under Manorialism impossible to achieve. Partly because it is so profitable to sell things to people who bear children, and those children as they too mature.

    EXAMPLES
    THe US economy is primarily driven by housing, and the high rate of return on lending for housing, and the large supply of labor jobs for the production of housing. From this perspective, the exceptional nature of the american economy is not the product of ‘democracy’ or innovation, but the product of selling off a continent to waves of immigrants and their offspring, and using the profits from the sale of the (conquered) continent to invest in increasingly complex technologies.

    THe Chinese for example have figured this out and are doing the same thing but moving people from the ‘poor’ village farm to cities where they *hope* the population will be more productive than they were at subsistence farming. China can do this bcause it adopted consumer capitalism (money, prices and interest) and abandoned communism (no money, no prices, and no interest). 

    The problem other countries face (India and say, Ukraine) is india is so pervasively corrupt that it’s not possible to create infrastructure without privatization of the investment through corruption, and the population is still expanding unsustainably in a dirty and hot environment.  THe problem Ukraine faces, is that it cannot play ‘china’ because the lower levels of government are so corrupt and the country sees no demand for its currency, so the government cannot issue credit, and therefore the people remain poor.

    IN CLOSING
    When you say ‘money went away’ what you must also understand is that with money and prices will go the ability to communicate, and think. Literally.  Humans would not be able to cooperate, communicate, plan and think without money. Worse, they would have no incentive to do so, because to have an incentive one must be able to think of something to do.  And you couldn’t think of anything to do that you couldn’t do with your own two hands.

    THere is about 4 days worth of energy, and 14 days worth of food in the pipeline. If you made money vanish, you would need to make 6B people vanish along with it.

    You may find a more thorough, or a more simplistic answer elsewhere. But this is the answer, and there isnt any alternative.

    https://www.quora.com/What-would-happen-if-there-were-no-money-on-earth

  • OBJECTIFY AND SUBJECTIFY – MEN VS WOMEN IN DEBATE One more fascinating differenc

    OBJECTIFY AND SUBJECTIFY – MEN VS WOMEN IN DEBATE

    One more fascinating difference between women and men in debate.

    As men, our ideas are separate from ourselves. We discuss, and argue, whenever possible with facts, not experiences. Women think we objectify them. Well, the fact is we do. But women aren’t special. We objectify everything. Objectifying things is what makes us MEN.

    With women, their ideas are indistinguishable from themselves. They discuss, argue, with experiences not facts independent of experiences. Women SUBJECTIFY everything. That is what makes them WOMEN.

    This is why men dominate debates (and hard sciences). If our arguments fail, we just try a different one, and learn from it. It isn’t personal. With women, not only is there argument a failure, but because it is intertwined with their emotional experiences, and because the identify with their emotional experiences they feel, far too often, that they have failed.

    Yet another reason why it is so much easier to be a male. I get exhausted whenever I try to think like a woman. I can do it for about half a second before I’m completely incapable of reason, and collapse from exhaustion. 😉

    But who would take care of screaming irrational children if women operated like men do? We’d be extinct.

    PS: now, before some idiot says “not all women”, please understand that categories that are universal describe distributions. It’s implicit that we are UNEQUAL even within gender, and therefore as UNEQUAL within gender, we can be described along multiple distributions. I realize that simple people think in simple terms (equality) but grownups think in terms of distributions and equilibria. ie: a point described by an ideal type, vs multiple-axis.

    The world is fascinating really if you don’t subscribe to dogma. 🙂

    🙂


    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-30 08:21:00 UTC

  • LOVE KONDRATIEV CYCLES: A great post by Helio Beltrão (Use google translate if y

    http://opontobase.com.br/kondratiev-a-irresistivel-forca-gravitacional-dos-ciclos-longos/I LOVE KONDRATIEV CYCLES:

    A great post by Helio Beltrão (Use google translate if you need to. It will do a fair job.)


    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-30 07:55:00 UTC